g Evangelical laymen to seek in the
assemblies what was arbitrarily withheld from them in the church.
"Whether it be good or bad, recommendable or deplorable," Grundtvig
wrote, "it is, at any rate, a fact that the spirit of the church service
has changed so greatly during the last half century that it is almost
impossible for an Evangelical Christian to derive any benefit from it,
and it is this situation that has forced earnest laymen to invent such a
substitute for the church as the private assemblies evidently are."

For a number of years Grundtvig thought and wrote almost ceaselessly
about this problem. With conditions so perverted that the lawbreakers
were imprisoning the victims of their own lawlessness, something ought
evidently to be done about it. But what could he do?

He tried to attack Rationalism from new angles. In a carefully written
article in "The Theological Monthly," a magazine that he published in
collaboration with the learned but crusty Dr. G. A. Rudelbach, he argued
that any inquiry concerning the nature of Christianity should distinguish
between the questions: What is true Christianity? and Is Christianity
True? The first was a historical question, and could be answered only by
an examination of the original teachings of Christianity; the second was
a question of conscience and depended on the attitude of the individual.
He was he asserted, perfectly willing to recognize the right of the
Rationalists to believe what ever they choose, but as a historian he had
to protest against the propagation of any belief under the name of
Christianity that clearly denied what Christianity originally affirmed.

His writing, however, produced no evident result. The rationalists either
maintained a contemptuous silence or answered him by their favorite cry
of ignorance and fanaticism. The true teachings of Christianity, they
asserted, could be ascertained only by the trained theologian, able to
read the Bible in the original and trained to interpret it in the light
of current knowledge. Such men knew, it was claimed, that many of the
doctrines formerly held by the church, such as the divinity of Christ,
the atonement and the triunity of God, were not found in the Scriptures
at all or were based on misread or misinterpreted texts.

Although these contentions were almost as old as Christianity itself,
Grundtvig still found that a clear refutation of them was practically
impossible. He could not disprove them by S